Thanassis Valtinos
New Moon: Day One
In a tour de force of innovation, memory, and distillation, Thanassis Valtinos shifts the literary ground from yet another angle.
Set in a provincial capital, in the penultimate throes of the Greek Civil War, New Moon: Day One is semi-autobiographical, a tale of two protagonists on the brink of manhood. They speak in bluntly human tones, but in precincts that echo of death the impulse to life is declared. In the very presence of Thanatos, Eros is adamant.
The elements of a screenplay are recast by Valtinos as a novel. Interposed with bursts of dialogue, and reading like stage directions, intimate scenes alternate with a wide-screen view. Fade-outs, as blank pages, punctuate the whole. Though the gaze is that of a camera — of pristine detachment — the energy is propulsive. The thread of a breathless suspense is drawn through a complex collage. It seems to precisely catch the rhythm of human becoming.
In New Moon: Day One the translators have rendered, through the many registers of the work, particular beauty in English.
A forward to the work by Stavros Deligiorgis
The most noteworthy thing here, if not in all of Valtinos’s work, is the maddening confluence of beauty and disaster. Valtinos never resorts to high-sounding rhetoric to describe what is great, universal, eternal, and heartbreakingly human . . . The “unstudied” appearance of his prose not only implies the highest level of narrative artistry but confers on the narrative a riveting clarity. Amidst the gloom of inclement weather, Valtinos insinuates instances of mystical transcendence.
—Lina Pantaleon, Kathimerini
Thanassis Valtinos, born in the Peloponnese, is one of Greece’s foremost writers. His consistently innovative and much imitated work has been widely translated and has earned him many awards, including Best Screenplay (the Cannes Film Festival 1984), the Greek State Prize for Best Novel (1990), the International Cavafy Prize (2002), and, most recently, the Greek State Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012).
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Jane Assimakopoulos is an American-born and -educated translator living in Greece. She is also a translation editor in charge for many years of an extensive series of books by Philip Roth.
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Stavros Deligiorgis is a University of Iowa professor emeritus in English and comparative literature. He is currently engaged in collaborative translations from and into Greek, Romanian, and Italian poetry and fiction.
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Softcover — ISBN 978-1-942281-35-1 — 182 pages
